Incremental speech recognition for dialog systems

A system comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a computer-readable storage medium storing instructions which, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to perform steps comprising:
• receiving, at a dialog manager an N-best list of incremental speech recognition results of user speech as part of a dialog with a user, wherein the incremental speech recognition results incorporate contextual information from a beginning of the dialog until the incremental speech recognition results were received;
• receiving, at the dialog manager, respective confidence scores for each incremental speech recognition result in the N-best list;
• and
• updating a dialog state associated with the dialog based on the respective confidence scores and the incremental speech results, and further based on an assumption that the incremental speech results are complete.

A tangible computer-readable storage medium having stored therein instructions which, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform a method comprising:

• receiving an incremental speech recognition result of user speech as part of a dialog with a user;
• copying a dialog manager operating on the user speech to generate a temporary dialog manager;
• evaluating an action of the temporary dialog manager based on the incremental speech recognition result;
• and
• upon determining that the action would advance the dialog and that the action is different than an existing action of the dialog manager:
• executing the action in the dialog;
• and
• replacing the dialog manager with the temporary dialog manager.